Left to be gotten —

Google strikes back at French global “right to be forgotten” order

Ad giant's top law man tells CNIL watchdog: "See you in court."

Google has appealed against an order from France's data watchdog to globally delist certain search results—thereby intensifying a row over the European Union's two-year-old "right to be forgotten" landmark ruling.

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The ad giant's general counsel Kent Walker confirmed that it would fight French regulator CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), after Google complied with a separate EU order in March this year.

Europe's top court ruled in 2014 that search engines should scrub old, out of date, or irrelevant listings on their indexes. Google—which commands roughly 90 percent of the search market in the EU—claimed at the time that such measures amounted to censorship of the Internet.

On Thursday, Walker stuck to that theme by saying that CNIL had gone too far with its demands for the company to apply the regulator's "interpretation of French law to every version of Google search globally." He added that Google had filed an appeal against CNIL's order with the Conseil d'Etat—France's Supreme Administrative Court.

Walker said in an op-ed for France's Le Monde newspaper, which was also posted on Google's Europe policy blog:

This order could lead to a global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one’s own country. For example, this could prevent French citizens from seeing content that is perfectly legal in France. This is not just a hypothetical concern.

We have received demands from governments to remove content globally on various grounds—and we have resisted, even if that has sometimes led to the blocking of our services.

In March, Google said that it would use geolocation signals (such as IP addresses) to restrict access to delisted URLs on all of its search domains.

CNIL could not immediately be reached for comment at time of publication.